The left’s race problem

From an objective perspective, the mainstream left clearly enjoys depicting conservatives as evil or morally deficient. There is something empowering about skipping rational argumentation and going straight to accusing your opponent of being a bad person. Presumably, it’s that less effort is involved in discussion and makes others, without even processing both sides intellectually, side with you by default because you are a good person and they are not.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the issue of race today. It is commonplace for left-wingers to label conservatives as racist and liberals as the saviors of marginalized groups. The logic is basically that, because conservatives don’t want people involuntarily distributing wealth to the poor (who are disproportionately represented by blacks), tend to oppose affirmative action, believe in broken-windows theory and support the “˜racist’ police, they don’t care about black people and are racist. It’s a simple tactic and one that frequently gets thrown around college campuses.

The people who are in the most uncomfortable of positions are black conservatives. To many blacks on the left, in some magical way, black conservatives are racist against their own race. It couldn’t possibly be that conservative blacks don’t believe in a victim mentality, do believe that diversity of viewpoints is more important than the level of melanin in your skin, care about dealing with the problems of crime within their own communities via active policing, don’t like incentivizing a high single-motherhood rate, which is directly related to many problems or just see that progressive policies are harmful to blacks, or at best aren’t working. No, people like Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas are plainly “˜Uncle Toms’ who hold their own heritage and color at arm’s length and side with the white racists.

To characterize black conservatives like this is morally wrong. It means quite obviously that leftists care more about demographic diversity than they do ideological diversity. Protecting ideological diversity is of the utmost importance because arguing whether something is right or wrong is how truth is discovered. To demonize people who differ politically based on their race is to demonize human beings who want the best for their fellow citizens and are also in the pursuit of truth.

It is 2016. One would think that humanity has moved on from demanding that certain races think a certain way, because we now know that viewpoints are determined by brains, not skin. Unfortunately, skin color still takes precedence in various ways. Hopefully some on the left are almost finished demonizing human beings because their race doesn’t match the political conviction they would like.